Eclipse shot his sister a hard stare and continued. “You’ve been working a fair bit of magic these last few months, boss. A lot more than in previous years. Maybe the levitation charm came to you faster than you realized it could?” He asked hopefully, trying to win his argument.
A chorus of conflicting points-of-view erupted between my kitties. I noticed one furball who said nothing.
“You don’t have an opinion, Jetstream?” I asked my agoraphobic cat
“Hey, I wasn’t there,” Jet answered in his rapid patter. “So I can’t make a judgment call one way or another here, boss.”
“That’s what you get for using up too much of your catnip,” Carbon said, stretching to full length before his beloved heat source. “Hells, I’m a homebody, and even I managed to get out of the house.”
“Hey, I have a chronic condition!”
“Yeah, it’s called ‘being you,'” Gloom muttered.
“Look,” I said, wanting to head off another verbal jousting. “Before we drag this debate out any further, it might help the more ignorant among us to know what the Chimera Charm actually is.”
“That would be your cue, Professor,” Gloom said to Onyx. “Educate the rest of the class.”
Onyx took a breath and then launched into his dissertation. With gusto. Midnight looked a little sullen at his brother’s stage presence.
“The Chimera Charm is a very old, very powerful magic. In all our years on this earth, I doubt that we Lemniscate have seen it more than…”
He looked over at his siblings and asked, “What, three times?”
“Four,” Eclipse said.
“W-well, five if you count that—“ Fraidy began to say.
“We don’t ever talk about that,” Gloom snapped. My female moggie was referring to that awful event of my childhood. The night I lost both of my parents to a house fire. I had tried to invoke the deluge charm, (an easy charm all things considered) but I couldn’t pull it off. My father had saved my life and had gone back into the blazing building to rescue my mom. They never made it out. Only a few months ago I found out that the fire wasn’t your pedestrian kind of inferno; no sloppy wiring, or careless leaving on of appliances. The fire was balefire. I had no chance of extinguishing it by using a traditional charm designed for putting out traditional fire. I came to live with Grandma Chimera at The Angel, I changed my birth name from Seraphim Joyvive to Hattie Jenkins. I couldn’t face being named after a guardian angel when I couldn’t even protect my own parents. It was from around this time that my interest in the magical arts completely disappeared. I fell, headfirst, into the world of herbs and healing botanicals.
“My point being,” Onyx asserted, giving a stern look at his sister. “It’s very rare. I believe that there are at least one or two Catholic saints who used it in the course of their miracles, just to give you a further idea.”
“Okay, we’ve got it,” Millie said. “But we’re still waiting for you to get around to telling us what it is and what it does, so do you think you can drop the Shakespearean theatrics for a couple of minutes and get to the point?” Millie shook her brightly colored hair indignantly, revealing Fraidy’s face for a brief second.
“Simply put, the charm absolves the recipient from all human guilt, fear, and doubt that dwells in and weighs down its subject. It’s like an absolution, and its effects are so great that it renders its target completely weightless. Weightless as in as light as a feather, and fully open to the light of goodness.” Onyx looked at each of us in turn, to make sure we understood the importance of his words. We were rapt. “Anyone notice the lights of goodness?” My sage cat queried.
The lights! I had wondered what those little golden bubbles were. I thought they were coming from the ride behind the Ferris wheel, but maybe Onyx was right?
“I saw that!” Fraidy squealed. “I saw that shaft of light coming from old-hag Morag!
“I could see that whole light show from Gabby’s stand,” Millie added. “It was all sparkles and stars. Never seen anything like it.”
“Oh, come ON!” Carbon blurted, clearly in Eclipse’s camp as far as his faith in my spell-casting went. “If this theory were tinder, it’d be too wet to hold a spark. Maybe the levitation charm mixed with an illusion spell or a light-bending spell or—“
“You’re wrong, brother,” Onyx said simply.
“Yeah, those lights were the light of goodness, for sure,” Fraidy said confidently from his veil of Millie’s hair. “The lights of personal freedom,” my timid cat concluded.
My exhaustion hit me like a ton of bricks then. “Well, you masters of the mystic arts can fight it out between you. I don’t know what happened, and I’m standing by that,”
I shuffled, already half asleep toward the stairs. “Millie, will you be okay to lock up?” I looked at my cat covered assistant.
“Get some rest, Hattie,” Millie said. “I’ll bring the cats up before I lock up. And, I’ll see you in the morning.”
With that, I ascended the stairs on heavy legs and with a confused head. All thoughts of the Chimera Charm overpowered by thoughts of sleep.
Chapter Four
I awoke to the shrill ring of my turn-of-the-century phone. I opened my eyes a crack and noticed the phone’s receiver vibrating wildly on its cradle. Already one of my kitties was busy giving my head a good kneading. I groaned and turned toward the phone.
“Hey, hold up, boss lady!” Shade said. “You’ve still got some tangles I need to—”
“Later, Shader,” I said, pulling my head off the pillow and away from his grooming paws. Noticing that the sunlight had yet to make an appearance, I picked up the earpiece and said into the receiver, “Hello, really annoying caller.”
“Hat? It’s David,” said the man I love. “Sorry to wake you up this early but we’ve had a break in the case.”
His words chased some of the sleep from my system. “What kind of break?”
“Maude found something. She wants to see us as soon as possible. Think you could meet me at the morgue in a couple of hours?”
I nodded. “Yeah…I’ll have to get Millie up to speed just before we open the shop. What time is it?”
“Fifteen till six.”
“What kind of monster are you?”
“Great, see you there.”
Click.
The morgue was a flat stone slab of a building. It stood out from the rest of its neighbors like a boulder in the middle of Munchkinland. Our good friend, and Gless Inlet’s resident ghoul coroner, Maude Dulgrey, had found something of importance on Morag Devlin’s corpse, it seemed. The building was intimidating in a hair-stand-on-end eerie kinda way. Maude Dulgrey, however, was the most cheerfully buoyant coroner you could meet. She also did a bang-up job of her work. Maude’s findings throughout all of our murder cases had certainly led to subsequent arrests. In short, we’d be nowhere without her astute autopsy skills.
David was waiting by the door when I arrived. Judging by the circles under his eyes, he’d slept about as well as I had. I know murder cases were stressful, but something else was eating at my friend. I’d never seen him like this before. I don’t know, but, the last month or so, the chief certainly seemed as if he’d lost his usually wry sense of humor.
“Hey,” he said with a wan smile. “Wasn’t sure you’d get here before I was invited in.”
“Had to spend a few minutes explaining to the cats why they couldn’t come,” I said, stifling a yawn. “How long have you been waiting?”
“Yikes, I bet you left an angry Carbon behind,” he offered apologetically and glanced at his watch. “For Goddess’ sakes, another one?” He shook his wrist vigorously and proceeded to tap the face of his watch with impatient fingers. David exhaled. “Not long, about five minutes, I guess?”
“How many watches have you gone through these last couple of months?” I quizzed my friend. Maybe it had been his proximity to the balefire beacon that he had had to snuff out during the Aurel Nugget investigation. Was it
possible that being so close to that infernal beacon had somehow upset the electromagnetic fields around him? I would have to question Maude about this sometime. Not while the Chief was present though.
“Too many,” David confessed. “But, we’re not here to discuss timekeeping, so let’s see what Maude’s got to say, shall we?” CPI Trew turned to the door and hammered the large, monster-fist knocker.
“Do you have any idea what she’s found?”
“Not a clue. But I know she received a whole bunch of brand new state-of-the-art tech from Talisman. So, I’m hoping her new gadgets have turned up something useful. Before you ask, she doesn’t know who signed the authority for the delivery. But, I have a feeling it might have something to do with the Custodian’s.”
I smiled brightly at my friend. “And, by Custodians, that must surely mean Portia Fearwyn.” I answered with a smug glow traveling through my body. David just rolled his eyes.
The wooden door opened at that moment. To our surprise, Hector Muerte stood on the threshold. Strange. Maude was usually the one to greet us when we popped in for a visit. Not that Hector wasn’t a gracious host or anything.
“Everything alright with Maude, Hector?” David asked, his words mirroring my creeping alarm.
The zombie assistant coroner gave an affirmative grunt and nodded, his milky eyes rolling in their sockets as his head bobbed up and down. Hector stepped aside and waved us in.
Day or night, the inside of the hallway always looked the same. A row of blazing torches lined the corridor, spaced between featureless wooden doors on either side. The walls and floor were composed of the same rock as the outer walls.
But the room at the end of the corridor was anything but the set of a medieval torture film. The lab’s back wall was lined with body freezers, and an examination table where a covered body currently lay. Maude had placed a surgical tray next to the body; gleaming tools of the trade lying in neat rows on the platter. Cutting edge equipment lined every wall of the room.
On a stool in front of a brand new centrifuge sat the mistress of the morgue, Maude Dulgrey. Her wispy hair hung in thin strands, barely concealing her pale and lumpy skull. It was no wonder Violet Mulberry, Gless Inlet’s self-professed coiffeuse, had ramped up her campaign for getting Maude inside the salon for some critical follicle attention. Maude’s complexion resembled gray dough, and her moth-eaten eyebrows gave her an almost comical look. But, even though Maude’s technical classification was that of a ghoul, the coroner was anything but ghoulish. She had one of the most perpetually cheerful dispositions I’d come across. The Infiniti loved her -- and not just because she doled out salmon treats -- and Maude loved the cats, in turn. She was humming Jackson Browne’s “Doctor My Eyes” as we entered the room. Maude’s lively fingers tapped some buttons on the cutting-edge equipment. No doubt wringing out a critical piece of evidence that we were soon to hear about. David nudged me and gave me an ‘I told you so,’ nod. I nodded in return, excited by the possible clues that Maude’s brand new machinery would spew out. Hector grunted and shuffled his feet on the spot.
“Yes, Hector dear, I heard you all coming,” Maude said patiently. “Why don’t you rest now, mister? You’ve been very helpful today, so you can take a load off while I update our favorite investigators here.”
Hector shambled to his preferred seat in the corner and Maude spun around on her seat to appraise us. She gave us one of her most dazzling toothy grins.
“So sorry I couldn’t greet you at the door, dearies,” she said, rising to her feet. “But I’m still trying to calibrate this …. This beautiful beast. Maude looked at her new piece of tech with fondness. “Just finishing up the last few adjustments now,” Maude said, rising from her seat to grab a pen from a countertop close by. Given her age, and the fact that she walked on two left feet, the coroner was surprisingly spry. In fact, since Maude had started dating the Fingernail Moon’s resident landlord, Horace Mangler, she had taken up ballroom dancing with those two unlikely feet. Wonders never cease, I tell ya.
David walked over to the centrifuge, and patting the side of the machine in admiration, he said, “So what have your new hi-tech toys told you about Morag’s death, Maude?” The coroner’s eyebrows knitted together in confusion for a second. Then the penny dropped.
“Ah, yes! Morag!” She clapped her hands and jumped from her seat at the centrifuge, zigzagging on mismatched feet across the room at incredible speed. Maude snatched what looked like a child’s book from a table close to where Hector was resting. The zombie noticed that the book was Maude’s target, and he grunted at a volume I’d not heard him use before. His eyes looked excited.
“No, no, Hector dear. You’ve already had your story. Rest now, and we’ll continue this little gem tonight, okay?” The zombie’s features slumped in undisguised disappointment. David and I looked at one another, both supremely puzzled. On two left feet, Maude bounced back toward us, her liverish lips tugging upward in a triumphant smile. In her hand she held a copy of “The Good of Elfkind,” by Harriet Hex. It was a kid’s book that even I’d read at least a dozen times during my childhood. It was like the Coven Isles version of the Grimm fairy tales.
Maude’s fingers rifled through the pages of the picture book until she found the spot she was looking for.
“Morag’s cause of death, dear Chief Para Inspector and Hattie, was THIS.” She stabbed a bony finger at a child’s illustration covering one of the pages of the book.
“Wait, so you’re telling us you’ve found Morag’s cause of death from a picture book?”
“As much as I’d enjoy basking in the glory of this discovery, it was actually Hector that alerted me to it. It seems he’s off his gargoyle fiction right now. We had only ten pages left in a gargoyle mystery, but Hector switched gears on me. He kept pulling this book from the shelf, waving it in front of my face all the time. I’ll admit I was surprised. Hector usually likes his bedtime stories to be a little more on the gothic side.”
David and I leaned in to take a look at the illustration Maude had marked out for us. The coroner turned the book toward us so we could see the page from the correct perspective. It was a full page illustration of an elf being cursed by what looked like a warlock. The latter was dressed in billowing black robes, and held a fierce wand that was directed at the terrified elf. From the tip of the wand a black electrical current arced and connected to the side of the little being’s face.
“So?” David questioned. I felt the same bemusement as the chief.
“So, you’re not looking closely enough,” Maude burbled with excitement. She shoved the illustration closer to our noses, forcing us both to pull back our heads just so we could gain some perspective. I noticed it then. “David! The elf’s head! Look!” The chief craned his neck toward the picture, and I watched his face as recognition settled into his features.
Where the arc of black electricity from the warlock wand met the elf’s head, a web of soot colored spider veins crept along the Fairy’s temples and traveled downward along his jaw.
“Come, come!” Maude’s eyebrows looked like a pair of mangy gerbils shooting skyward in her excitement. She skipped across the room toward the draped cadaver waiting there. David and I followed, our mouths open in wordless wonder at this buoyant woman’s antics. Maude pulled back the sheet from Morag’s corpse in a dramatic flair. She held the picture book up to the deceased’s temples, proving that the dead woman had died by the exact same method used to kill the fictional elf. David and I were still gawping when Maude proudly announced, “Behold! The Vencap curse!” The coroner permitted us to stare a little longer at both the picture book and Morag’s ‘blight.’ She lifted the coverlet gently then, covering Ms. Devlin’s inert frame once more. “As far as I’m aware, no one’s seen this nasty little piece of magic since the Warlock Wars. And even then, this spell was just a rumor. Any warlock who had survived those ugly times had always claimed that it was just black propaganda by the winning side. But, as you can see …
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br /> “So, it was this … this Vencap curse that killed Morag? Not the fall?” I asked, feeling better about the lawyer’s demise already. I guess I wanted absolute vindication for having harmed, (or perhaps even killed) the poor woman.
“It would almost certainly seem to be, yes. However, I am a good enough scientist to want to test the story’s premise with an examination of my own. Given those reports you told me about Morag jumping to her death, and seemingly having no reason for doing so, the Vencap may not have been the only magic at play.”
“Guess we can rule this as a homicide, then” David said, pulling out his notepad and pen.
“So, Maude, what extra piece of evidence do you have spinning in the centrifuge then?”
The coroner returned the chief’s question with a blank stare. A full second passed before Maude’s flea-bitten eyebrows shot upward and her face broke into a sunny smile.
“That’s not evidence, Chief Para Inspector,” she chortled. “That’s broccoli juice!”
“Huh?” I spun toward the machine.
“Yes, yes!” Maude exclaimed, prancing toward the metallic spinner. “Hector’s tummy can’t handle the fibre from whole vegetables late at night, so I like to send him to bed with a glass of juice instead. This way he’s still getting all the minerals and vitamins.” Ms. Dulgrey pivoted on one left foot toward the resting zombie. “I must say, his skin has been positively radiant since I’ve started him on the juice.” She looked fondly at the slumbering Hector as we all watched a hunk of rotting flesh fall from Hector’s chin to plop into his lap. The coroner slapped the side of the centrifuge. “Far more efficient than my old juicer, and much easier to clean too!” “My tax dollars at work,” I mumbled.
After getting assurances from our ghoul coroner that she would call us once she had an ‘official’ autopsy on Morag, David and I left. Just outside the front door, I noticed the chief frowning. He hadn’t yet put away his notepad and was flipping through the pages now looking for something. I tapped my foot in mock impatience, but my friend gave nothing away. He looked at me, his eyes questioning.
The Chimera Charm Page 5